Picasso among £200m stolen masterpieces ‘burned in oven’

Seven world-famous paintings worth £200 million are thought to have been burnt by a Romanian woman whose son is accused of stealing them.

The masterpieces include exquisite London scenes by Claude Monet, as well as works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse — prompting one expert to describe their feared destruction as a “crime against humanity”.

All were taken in a heist at Rotterdam’s Kunsthal museum last October, when thieves arrived in daylight and stripped the walls in under two minutes.

Six Romanians have been charged with the theft, and now detectives in their home country have found the charred remains of what looks like the paintings in an oven.

They were put there by Olga Dogaru who said she torched the artwork to “destroy the evidence” following her son Radu’s arrest in January.

Forensic specialists later confirmed that “small fragments of painting primer, the remains of canvas and paint” were found in the oven. The ashes will be analysed before being submitted to prosecutors in the men’s trial, which starts next month.

Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, the director of Romania’s National History Museum, said burning the paintings would be “a crime against humanity”.

Mrs Dogaru originally hid the artwork in an abandoned house and then in a cemetery. When police started searching her home she dug the paintings up and burned them.

She said: “I placed the suitcase containing the paintings in the stove. I then added some logs, slippers and rubber shoes and waited until they had completely burned.”